Chapter 6: Teaching Privilege Amongst the Privilege: A Difficult Topic to Broach and Understand

In sociology, professors get into a lot of heavy topics—so much so that the syllabus may come with a warning to students concerning what they are getting into with their foray into the subject. Many claim that economics is the sad science, with an argument that people are driven largely by self-preservation and invisible market forces. However, economics merely focuses on one part of society: the economy. In reality, one can make a powerful argument that sociology can take the title of “sad science” as the discipline encompasses all institutions of the social world. It means that the sociologist, in the classroom, has to cover a lot of information in a span of 16 weeks, and a lot of it can be quite depressing, in one light, or enlightening and empowering from another perspective—it all depends on the audience in the classroom. The chapter at hand is going to focus on the group of students that is surprised to find out from their sociology professors that the world they live in is not simple, and to expose them to the advantages they have had since birth that they may not recognize as contributing to their success. Those are the students that sociologists strive to reach.